What is Billy The Badger?
Billy the Badger is a an app and stuffed toy that helps staff, parents and their babies in their journey through the neonatal intensive care unit. The main function of the app is the stories section in which parents are able to record stories that can be sent to the Billy soft toy speaker on top of their babies incubator to allow premature babies to hear their parents voice even when they are apart. The parents voice and in particular the mother's voice has been scientifically shown to help premature babies hearts and respiratory systems as well aid in their cognitive development even at such a young age. The app also provides parents with a memories section in which they can document their journey in the neonatal unit with photos in the form of digital polaroid's which are time and date stamped. Their is also a community section that provides information to parents on a variety of topics as well as links to the various incredible resources available on bliss.org.uk to help make their journey a little bit easier and less stressful.
Demo Video
The Inspiration
Billy the Badger was a project created by me and a friend as part of one of our University briefs called "Tell Me A Story". The brief was about designing an app and speaker that would allow parents who have had a premature baby be able to record and send stories to their baby whilst they are separated in the neonatal unit. The idea behind Billy was that we wanted to create a character that would help guide parents through their journey in the neonatal unit as well as being a character for a soft cuddly toy that could contain the speaker that the parents stories would be played from. This creates a form of physical connection between the parent and the baby as they each have this playful badger character at their side every step of the way. The reason we chose a Badger was because of a trip to our local hospitals neonatal unit that we took in order to gain insights from the ward, staff and parents. The entire ward was decorated in pastel colours and hand painted animal designs and of all the animal designs we just felt that the badger just had the cute and cuddly feel of a teddy bear. We also made use of the colour scheme from the ward within our app as shown in the video above and in the 3 colour swatches shown at the top of this page.
